The Horses of St. Mark's

by Charles Freeman

  Now the Doge himself with a vast crowd of noblemen had taken his place at the very front of the temple above its entrance, the place where those four bronze and gilt horses, the work of some ancient and famous artists unknown to us, stand as if alive, seeming to neigh from on high and paw with their feet. Where he stood on this marble platform it had been arranged that all should be under his feet, and multicoloured awnings were hung everywhere as protection against the heat and glare of the setting summer sun.

  The occasion was a victory celebration, applauding the defeat of a serious revolt in Crete, and one is reminded of the similar use of the hippodrome in Constantinople by the twelfth century. The emperor Manuel, for instance, is described as returning to Constantinople in 1150 after a major victory over the Serbs to be ‘acclaimed’ in the hippodrome ‘by the people and the entire senate; the recipient of applause and praise, he reviewed the horse races and spectacles.’ Much the same seems to have happened in the Piazza on this occasion. Petrarch goes on: ‘When religion had amply received its due, everyone turned to games and spectacles.’ Among the races were ones on horseback; there were also tournaments and other contests and festivities. Just as in a hippodrome, there was a densely packed mass of spectators.

  Petrarch describes the doge standing on the loggia alongside the horses. A comparison can be made with a relief of the Byzantine emperor Theodosius (AD 379–95), which shows him presiding over the hippodrome in Constantinople. In each case the emperor/doge stood over an arch. (The Art Archive)

  Down below [in the Piazza] there was not a vacant inch; as the saying goes, a grain of millet could not have fallen to earth. The great square, the church itself, the towers, roofs, porches, windows were not so much filled as jammed with spectators … On the right a great wooden grandstand had been hastily erected for this purpose only. There sat four hundred young women of the flower of the nobility, very beautiful and splendidly dressed.

  It appears, then, that the doges used the Piazza San Marco as a ceremonial arena much as the emperors had come to use the hippodrome in Constantinople. There is even intriguing evidence, although from a much later date, that the processions which came to take up such a large part of Venetian life could be linked back to Byzantine ceremonial ritual. One of the most celebrated of Venetian paintings, now in the Accademia in the city, is Gentile Bellini’s Procession in the Piazza San Marco, which shows the festivities of 25 April, the feast day of St Mark himself, in 1496. In the foreground one of the city’s scuole (confraternities of citizens set up to dispense charity), that of San Giovanni Evangelista, carries its relic of the True Cross. The painting was commissioned, in fact, by the scuola itself as part of a cycle which celebrated their important relic and the miracles it had effected. Before and behind the relic walk white-robed officials carrying white candles. A man whose son has been healed by the cross kneels behind it. On the right the doge and city dignitaries are assembled while a mass of white-mantled citizens stand in ranks on the left. Behind the crowds St Mark’s is shown in all its radiant glory, and the horses stand out in this earliest painting to show them on the loggia.

  Looking at the painting, one is reminded of a description of the founding of Constantinople given in a Byzantine document, the Chronicon Paschale:

  He [Constantine] made for himself another gilded monument of wood, one bearing in his right hand a Tyche of the same city also gilded, and commanded that on the same day of the anniversary chariot races, the same monument of wood should enter [the hippodrome], escorted by the troops in [white] mantles and slippers, all holding white candles; the carriage should proceed around the further turning post and come to the arena opposite the imperial box; and the emperor of the day should rise and do obeisance to the monuments of the same emperor Constantine and this Tyche of the city.

  Is what we see in Bellini’s picture a Byzantine ritual adapted to serve the needs of Constantinople, with the wood of the True Cross in its gilded reliquary replacing ‘the gilded monument of wood’? Certainly the candles and the white mantles appear to link the two – one even has a peep of the white slippers of one or two of Bellini’s participants! (White was always the colour in which groups clothed themselves in both Greek and Roman processions. In Venice in this period white was a mark of status because it signified detachment from the workaday world where clothes were easily soiled.) It is possible that the Venetians had deliberately incorporated the foundation ceremony of Constantinople – which, as we have seen, took place in the hippodrome – into the feast-day celebrations of the patron saint of Venice.

  Procession in the Piazza San Marco, 1496, by Gentile Bellini. The first surviving painting to show the horses in situ. The procession itself echoes those described in the early Byzantine empire. (Academia Venezia/Scala)

  So we come to the possibility that one of the reasons why the horses were placed where they were was because they reinforced the idea of the Piazza as a ceremonial hippodrome. Of course, there is no suggestion that chariot races were held in the Piazza (although there is an account of a festival there in 1413 in which over four hundred horsemen took part). In any case, by this time the hippodrome in Constantinople, which many Venetians would have seen, had almost lost its function as an arena for races and was predominantly a ceremonial venue.

  For further evidence in favour of this idea we need to return to the two reliefs of Hercules which, as noted in chapter 7, were placed on the western façade of St Mark’s, one at either end. As with the two other pairs of reliefs between them, one is from Constantinople (dated as early as the fifth century) and the other carved in Venice in the thirteenth century. The older relief shows Hercules in one of his most famous labours, the killing of the Erymanthean Boar. The other portrays the hero having completed two labours, the killings of the Cerynean Hind and the Lernean Hydra. The San Alipio mosaic shows them in place so they must have been erected before 1267.

  Two reliefs of Hercules known to have been placed on the façade of St Mark’s by the 1260s. The one showing Hercules carrying the Erymanthean Boar is antique, the other, showing the killing of the Cerynean Hind and the Lernean Hydra, is from the thirteenth century. Hercules was the patron of the hippodrome and it is arguable that the placing of the reliefs was intended to reinforce the idea that here, symbolically, was a ceremonial hippodrome. (S. Marco, Venezia/Scala)

  The relief with the Erymanthean Boar closely follows earlier classical models – a third-century sarcophagus found in Rome has a relief almost identical to it – and when it was put in place on the façade it was given an antique framing with dentils. It was as if the antiquity of the relief were being deliberately highlighted. The sculptor of the ‘new’ Hercules copied the pose of the other relief and carved the dead hind and the hydra around it in a way not known from earlier reliefs. He obviously had no classical example to work from. The setting of Hercules here, alongside four religious reliefs on the façade of a Christian church, seems bizarre. However, the commentators on these reliefs, notably Otto Demus, the great authority on the fabric of St Mark’s, explain that Hercules could be used in Christian contexts. As a symbol of strength he could be linked to Samson, even to the Saviour himself ‘conquering evil and saving the souls of the faithful’. Moreover, the earliest political centre in the lagoon, Eraclea, was named after him – perhaps echoing legends that Hercules had been the tribal hero of the Veneti, the original tribe in the area – and other churches in the region have Hercules represented on them.

  There is, however, another possibility. As we have seen in previous chapters, in both the Greek and the Roman world Hercules was associated, among other things, with chariot racing and the hippodrome. Could it be that these two reliefs were placed on the façade roughly at the same time as the horses in order to emphasize that the Piazza was a symbolic hippodrome? The evidence cannot be conclusive, but it reinforces rather than excludes the possibility.

  If the horses were associated with the assertion of imperial prestige, is there a particular doge or event before 12
67 to which their elevation on to the loggia can be related? There is no mention of the horses on the loggia at the coronation of Zeno in 1253, although this is no evidence in itself that they were not in place. We have only the terminal date of the San Alipio mosaic in 1267, when Zeno was still doge. Zeno’s reign marked the zenith of imperial glamour. He was an immensely rich man and fond of displaying himself before his people in gold and jewels in a manner reminiscent of Constantine. During the Easter season he processed through the Piazza each Sunday dressed in all his regalia; the season ended, on Ascension Day, with the grand ceremony of La Sensa, in which the doge and his retinue took to their barges and at the entrance to the lagoon from the open sea cast a gold ring into the water to symbolize Venice’s ‘marriage’ to the sea. This ceremony, perhaps the most hallowed in the Venetian calendar, reached its most elaborate and opulent form in his reign.

  The horses could have been put in place simply as part of Zeno’s programme of imperial display; but if one is looking for another, more immediate catalyst for the elevation one could also see it as a response to a political crisis. There was good reason why, in the mid-1260s, Venice should have felt the need to reassert its imperial pride through a dramatic reminder of its earlier humiliation of Constantinople. These were years when, despite the glamour of Zeno’s dogeship, things were turning sour for Venice. In 1259 the city’s confidence had been undermined when a new French king of Sicily had annexed Corfu and parts of the Dalmatian coast, infringing Venice’s control of the Adriatic. Such intrusions always made the city edgy. Worse was to come. In 1261 a Greek emperor, Michael Palaiologos, regained control of Constantinople with the help of Genoa, Venice’s ancient rival. The Venetian quarter was put to the flames, and there are harrowing stories of its inhabitants, many of whom had known no other home, crowding down to the shore where they were evacuated by the thirty Venetian ships in port. The last podestà, Marco Gradenigo, left with them. Zeno continued to use his title of ‘lord of quarter and half a quarter of the Roman empire’ (he pointedly wrote to the new emperor Michael as ‘emperor of the Greeks’ not ‘of the Romans’, the ancient title which Michael might have hoped for) but it was a hollow one. In return for their help, the Genoans had been granted rights to have a colony at Galata, just across the Golden Horn from Constantinople, and they retained these rights even after Venice and the empire eventually made peace in 1268. The Venetians, although they saved many of their trading posts in the eastern Mediterranean, never recovered their favoured position within the Byzantine capital. At home, meanwhile, the strain of defending what remained of the empire is known to have led to unrest and food riots.

  It may well have been during this period of crisis that Zeno decided to use the horses specifically as propaganda to revive the confidence of his city. He was a proud and determined man, sensitive to the prestige of Venice. When in 1265 the new emperor offered him a peace treaty that would have once more granted the Venetians a quarter in Constantinople and freedom to settle in the Black Sea, he declared himself offended by its tone which, he said, was too reminiscent of earlier treaties in which Venice had acquiesced in the supremacy of the Byzantines. So he turned it down. If a flamboyant gesture of Venice’s pride were now needed, what better than to haul the horses up on to the loggia where they could be seen by all and act as a reminder that the doges were still emperors in spirit? With the doges identifying themselves so closely with Christ they could be presented as ‘the quadriga of the lord’ and yet still function as the presiding symbol of an imperial hippodrome. The Venetians were adept at creating different layers of meaning in their monuments. With the horses in place, the final embellishment of the Piazza, its herringbone paving, which we know was laid down in 1266, was now put in hand.

  The association with the Byzantine emperors, so carefully cultivated by the doges, did not last; indeed, their claim to any kind of imperial grandeur was soon under threat. By the end of the thirteenth century Venice had lost its position in Constantinople and the Byzantine empire had revived itself for a final period of independence before its extinction at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Old rivals such as Genoa and Pisa, as well as newly emerging Italian cities such as Bologna and Ancona, were threatening Venetian trade. Even Venice’s control over the Adriatic, the sea it claimed as its own, was threatened. In 1273 the Bolognans forced Venice to allow them to import corn directly through the Adriatic ports, so depriving the city of the trade. Conflict with Genoa simmered on through the 1290s. In 1311 Zara, encouraged by the Hungarians, revolted. In Venice itself there were renewed food shortages and currency problems.

  As unrest grew, in 1297 the Great Council was reorganized through the law of the Serrata, with the aim of creating a more stable form of government. While the Serrata, the ‘cutting-off’, would eventually confine government to a finite circle of nobility, in the short term the act allowed more commoners to be included in the nobility, and others were incorporated in the decades that followed. Any immediate hope that this measure would bring calm was dashed by continuing popular disaffection and disorder, in which even the position of doge was challenged. In 1310 Doge Pietro Gradenigo (r. 1289–1311) was the focus of an assassination attempt which, although led by nobles, enjoyed wider support; and when he died (of natural causes, in the end) he could not even have a public burial because it was feared that his corpse would be set upon and desecrated. The secretive Council of Ten, which had the power to order the killing of those suspected of crimes, was set up in 1310 and became a fixed feature of the political system.

  This was a different world from that of 1204; even if St Mark’s had carried with it connotations of the hippodrome in the thirteenth century, these would have disappeared as popular involvement in government waned and the role of the doge diminished. At the death of each doge a committee met to draw up the coronation oath of his successor, and a study of these shows that with each reign the powers of the doge became more limited. Marriage alliances with European royal families, for instance, were forbidden. No doge was buried in St Mark’s after 1354. Up to the 1380s one finds that several ancient families – the Dandolos, the Morosinis, the Zenos and the Faliers – provided among them a succession of doges; after this date these families fade from prominence and a number of new ones, some of them having gained their high status through recent military successes, achieve prominence.

  The rituals surrounding the election and coronation of the doge evolved new forms as he became increasingly subject to the Grand Council. By the fifteenth century the doge was elected by an intricate system in which only the nobility played a part, and even the presentation of the doge before his people for formal approval had vanished. His election was now confirmed inside St Mark’s by the leader of the forty-one electing nobles. The doge then processed outside the basilica and even though he was elevated above the people in the Piazza on a wooden platform, no part of the ceremony involved his asking them for their support. It was simply assumed. The procession now moved to the Doge’s Palace and by the end of the fifteenth century it was here that the formal coronation took place. What had originally been a rather secret, private building had been transformed by an opulent entrance near San Marco, the Porta della Carta (built 1438–42), and the Scala dei Giganti (completed about 1490), a grand ceremonial staircase which led from the inner court to the first floor. The new doge would ascend this and then present himself to the crowds from a balcony inside the palace courtyard. So by this time one has to accept that the Piazza San Marco was no longer seen as fulfilling the ‘coronation’ functions of a hippodrome. Gone were the days when the doges were ‘emperors’ acclaimed by the people. They were now servants of the nobility.

  9

  VENICE: THE REPUBLICAN COMMUNITY

  THE WITHDRAWAL OF ITS IMPERIAL ROLE DID NOT MEAN that the Piazza San Marco was left without purpose. If there was a single theme which ran through Venice’s history, it was its success as a republican community. Despite episodes of unrest at times of crisis such as that descri
bed in the previous chapter, Venetians had a strong and enduring sense of common identity and purpose. Indeed, the very earliest chronicle of Venetian history, that written by John the Deacon in the early eleventh century, praised the harmony in which Venice’s population lived on its cluster of islands. The Piazza became the arena in which the city’s communal pride was celebrated, the setting for the many ritual processions which celebrated the links between Venice and its patron, St Mark. The year was punctuated by key dates: 25 April was Mark’s feast day; 31 January the anniversary of the arrival of his body in Venice; 25 June that of the miraculous rediscovery of his body after the basilica had been destroyed by fire in the eleventh century; and 8 October the anniversary of the dedication of the church itself. These processions served many uses, both religious and political, but they represented above all the regular reaffirmation of the city both as a community and as a republic, rather than merely the domain of an emperor. In this the very size of the Piazza was crucial: it was so large that there were no practical obstacles to mounting major processions in which the citizenry could display itself as a single entity.

  We can see this process in action if we return to Gentile Bellini’s Procession in the Piazza San Marco (p. 113). Bellini went out of his way to stress the communal harmony of the city, and he shows how there is space for everyone to display themselves in their uniforms of office and to be observed by others. Bellini elaborates the point by displaying the coats of arms of all the major scuole of the city on the canopy held over the relic, even though this is the procession of only one of them. During the ritual within St Mark’s that followed the procession, the representatives of each scuola presented their candles to the doge, his wife, the papal nuncio and the entire religious and political hierarchy of the city, thus consolidating their own place within the community. This was a symbolically significant moment, because the officials of the scuole tended to be drawn from the cittadini, the citizen class, the class below the nobility who were otherwise excluded from public affairs.